Gregory Colbert - The Nomadic Museum

The Nomadic Museum

Gregory Colbert’s Nomadic Museum is a purpose-built temporary structure used to house his traveling Ashes and Snow film and photography exhibition. Just as Colbert aims, in his films and photographs to depict a world without hierarchy between species, a place where there is no “other,” he intends the Nomadic Museum to be inclusive, not elitist, a democratic expression of the wonder of nature that is accessible by visitors of all cultural and social backgrounds.

To share his photographs and films, Colbert imagined a structure that could easily be assembled in ports of call around the world, providing an ephemeral environment for his work. He envisioned a building that would be the architectural equivalent of open arms, a place that would welcome rather than intimidate visitors, and would emerge seamlessly from the world of the images themselves. The Nomadic Museum resolves the disconnect that often exists between an artist’s work and the environment in which it is presented.

A review of the first Nomadic Museum in Modern Painter stated, "The Nomadic Museum restores the possibility of wonder to museums whose excesses of clarity and light have banished the shadows. The power of the show and the power of the building are so reciprocal that it is difficult to separate the dancer from the dance…In these agnostic and cynical times, the building becomes a place to feel and even believe. Ashes and Snow is a show that is disarmingly, and grandly, simple." The Wall Street Journal commented, "His astonishing pictures—sepia and umber in tone…documented the whole caravan of beauteous creatures who had passed before his magic lens…For all its apparent sobriety, this is an ecstatic space; as for the installation, it is Zen…It’s like a Rothko chapel writ large."

The Nomadic Museum is chartered to travel the globe with no final destination.